Brazil is and always will be a soccer country, especially during a year in which it hosts the World Cup.

Nevertheless, the major U.S. sports leagues for football, baseball and cheap jerseys usa basketball are seeing unprecedented growth here as Brazilians become wealthier, more worldly and even frustrated with the shortcomings of their own national pastime.
The newfound success of the U.S.' National Football League (NFL), Major League Baseball (MLB) and the National Basketball Association (NBA) here has been a surprise even to their own executives, although Rio de Janeiro's beaches have not been taken over by touch football just yet.

Baseball and football remain niche sports in Brazil, with even basic rules a mystery to most observers here. Basketball has a longer tradition here, but is still likely not even the second-most popular sport in the country. That is thought to be either volleyball or mixed-martial arts.

Yet each of the U.S. jerseys china major sports leagues can point to important milestones in Brazil during jerseys cheap the past two years.
The NBA became the first U.S. league to open a permanent office in Brazil, in 2012. The NFL saw its average TV audience in Brazil double in 2013.

MLB welcomed the big-league debut of its first Brazilian-born player in 2012 and at least two others are expected to make professional rosters this year.
"There has been an awakening of the Brazilian market and a lot of people are benefiting from it," said Chris Parsons, the NFL's senior vice president for international affairs.
He linked the rising interest to Brazil's economic boom in the last decade, which lifted some 35 million Brazilians out of poverty and into the middle class.

That fueled an explosion in air travel, especially to the United States. The number of visas issued by U.S. consulates in Brazil more than doubled between 2008 and 2012, to one million.
As a result, Parsons said U.S. sports have become an "aspirational" status symbol - an expression of newfound affluence, especially among the youth who set the stylistic tone in cultural capitals like S